Authors: Jim Fusilli
She was older than I usually liked, but not by much, and her hair was just right, and she wore this sparkly pink nail varnish that made you think things. I think I knew she would be the next one as soon as I saw her. She sort of half smiled at me and I thought, yes. There it was. Bashful and secretly wicked.
I gave it all a lot of thought, but when the time came and I actually had her in the car, it took an unexpected turn.
“Don't take me straight home,” she said. “Drive me to Longridge.”
“Longridge?” I said. “What's in Longridge?”
“Fields,” she said. “Trees. It's a nice night and I want to sit where there's a nice view.”
I couldn't believe my luck, to tell you the truth. A secluded spot out of her normal routine? It might be just what I needed, particularly if I could avoid the traffic cameras. On my lunch break I had already switched the license plates on my Escort, just for added safety, so even the traffic cameras might not have been too much of a risk.
It was a nice night for the time of year, chilly, as you'd expect, and quickly getting dark, but not rainy, and I found myself warming to the idea, amused by how easy she is making it for me. Even so, I was taken aback when she pulled out a dainty little flask from her handbag and offered me a swig. I stared at her, wondering momentarily if she was not the girl I took her for.
“I'm driving,” I said.
“Coward,” she teased, waggling the flask in front of me. It was stainless steel but decorated with little pink cats. “Go on,” she said. “Be a man.”
I flushed at that, and privately decided to make her pay for it later, but I took the flask from her and, just to prove the point, drained the whole thing in three long swallows. The whiskey burned my throat, but the fire was useful. Sometimes I needed a little push. It was not usually the girl who gave it to me quite so directly.
“So where in Longridge?” I asked, already feeling the whiskey starting to work.
“The disused reservoir on the edge of town.”
I didn't say anything for a moment, and kept driving, mind racing. I knew the place vaguely: a Victorian stone-edged rectangle with a sloping grass verge and trees. You couldn't see it from the road unless you were way up on the hill, and then you would be too far away to see anything, especially after dark. It might be perfect. I'd need to be careful, of course, but then I always was. I wasn't sure what disused meant. No manned pumping station was, of course, good, but if it had been drained, then that would be no use to me. A well-weighted body could stay lost for a long time in water.
“What do they use it for now?” I asked, trying to sound casual, eyes on the road ahead.
“Nothing,” she said. “Fishing, I think.”
Fishing meant water, of course, though it also meant snagged hooks on hair and clothing if you weren't careful.
For a moment the dotted white line on the road seemed to shift and blur and I wondered if the whiskey was a mistake, but I fought to concentrate and keep going till she told me where to turn. Even so I took the bend wider than I'd meant to and slowed down deliberately.
Make it last
, I thought
.
I didn't want to rush anything, and not just because rushing makes you careless. Half the satisfaction was in the buildup. Everyone knew that.
So I drove and she told me where to park. I didn't like her giving orders just as I hadn't liked her waggling the flask and saying I wasn't a man, but I let it go for now. She'd know who is in charge soon enough.
It was dark now, and the reservoir was glittering and black, but over on the other side I thought I saw the shape of another car. I didn't like that, even if the people inside were probably too interested in each other to pay us any attention.
“Maybe we should go somewhere else,” I said, but she shook her head and took off her seatbelt as if she was getting ready for something. In front of the car the grass fell away into the water, but fifty yards or so across there was a narrow spit of land with a road to some kind of access point, and I saw the way a thick metal cable seemed to run from there into the water and over to us, ending in a big rusting hook no more than a few yards from the passenger-side wheel. I didn't know why I notice it, and it bothered me because I realized how much my mind was wandering. I started to say something, but the words came out garbled, slurred, like I'd had a stroke.
She opened her purse and took out a nail file, using it to trim a cuticle like it was suddenly the most important thing in the world and I felt a weird sense of strangeness, of vertigo, like the world had shifted. But then she gave me that smile of hers and in spite of everything else that felt wrong I thought
yes
. Now. This was when I'd do it. She was perfect. Ready. I had to hold onto the idea though, because my head was swimming and when I reached for the ancient cassette player in the dashâcarefully maintained through the yearsâmy hand was unsteady. More than that, the muscles felt loose, disconnected, so that instead of punching the button I sort of flapped at the controls but didn't quite reach them. It was the weirdest sensation I've ever had. My brain was alert, but my hand felt like it was not in my control, like the nerves were dead, turned to rubber or a bunch of sausages stuck to my arm. I tried again, but the feeling was spreading from the wrist now, through the elbow and up, so that nothing seemed to be working properly.
“Let me get that for you,” she said, tapping the button precisely.
Here came the bass, the staccato rattle of the snare drum, the voice with its load of spiky, fractured words . . .
“Oh this,” she said. “I thought it would be this.”
I tried to look at her but my head wouldn't turn all the way and I couldn't stop her as she reached into the steering column and flashed the headlights twice. There was an answering flash from the car on the other side of the reservoir, and moments later it was coming toward us.
“You know the first time I heard this?” she said, nodding at the stereo. “I don't remember because I was very small, but it was at my aunt's funeral. Michelle. You remember Michelle, don't you, Barry? I was too young to understand then, but they used to talk about it, her mum and dad. The way you played a few bars when you turned your engine on at the funeral. Like it was a mistake. But they knew. They always knew. They even told the police, but no one took them seriously. Said a song on the radio wasn't real evidence. You know what, Barry?” she said looking at me with something that was almost a smile, but cold as the girl in the song, “I think if there had been one woman on that investigationâone female police officerâthey would have got you in a second. Because you're obvious. Small and obvious.”
I tried to turn away, but couldn't. Something wasn't right. And now she was listening to the song as if she'd never heard it before, nodding her head in time to the rhythm.
“Good song,” she said. “I wondered if you would have moved on to something else. âPsycho Killer,' say, or âDon't Like Mondays,' but those are a bit on the nose for someone like you, aren't they? Too self-aware. You're more the type who thinks âEvery Breath You Take' is a love song, aren't you, Barry? I'm glad you stuck with this. You know what it's about, right?” she said, not flirty now, not playful. “A man whose girlfriend would rather watch TV than have sex with him. I expect you know all about that, don't you, Barry?”
I wanted to say that she was wrong, that it was a sinister study of heartless women getting what they have coming to them, but my mouth won't move right and now I was looking at the flask and wondering if she drank from it at all.
“I can almost remember you at the funeral,” she said, thoughtfully. “Almost, but not quite. Michelle's mum and dad remember though. That's them coming now.”
I couldn't turn away so I could see that the car was not a car but a pick up truck with a little crane on the back.
“âThey call it instant justice,'” she sang along with Elvis, and gave me a grin. “Well, not instant.”
And then Janice was taking the brake off, getting out and closing the door behind her and I couldn't move, couldn't turn the engine back on, even as I felt her hook up the chain to the underside of the car. The pickup truck had parked on the end of that spit of land and someone out there in the dark was connecting a winch. I could feel the strain of the cable as it tightened, feel the creak of the car as it began to roll into the water, but all I could hear was “Watching the Detectives” as the car started to fill, cold and black and stifling.
BOY WONDER
BY JIM FUSILLI
I
T
HAPPENED
SO
TERRIBLY
QUICKLY
. Bowie Thomas was spinning after midnight at a warehouse in Sault Ste. Marie; the standard DJ fare, but with a bit more bite and taste: a few EDM hits for the crowd; lots of house from Detroit, 350 miles south; some techno out of Berlin; and then he mixed in a few tunes he'd created using Reason, his Midi keyboard, his Nord synthesizer, and his family's old upright piano, the one his father bought for Bowie's lessons beginning at age six. A good show: tight, fluid, musical. Bowie was pleased, quietly so, as was his way.
As he was packing up his car, bundled against the snapping winter wind, he was approached by Emily, a sophomore at his high school. Bowie tried to place her: a brother off in the Navy; their father hunted elk and whitetail deer with a bunch of steel fitters who were Packers fans; mother? Kind of a loner. “Hi,” said Bowie, blowing on a bare hand.
Shy and awkward, Emily sputtered to tell him his set was hot. She tugged at her tuque, which bore the school colors.
“Thank you,” said Bowie, as he put a blanket over his gear.
She asked about the tracks she didn't recognize.
He replied with titles.
“All yours?”
“All mine,” he said. “No one else to blame.”
“They're great,” she said with a bright smile. “Really.”
Music brings her out of her shell, doesn't it? “Well, I'd better be . . .”
“Okay. Sure, okay.” Head down, Emily trotted off toward her father and his mud-caked Grand Cherokee. Stopping suddenly, she turned and shouted: “Really hot.”
Bowie nodded, waved.
When he returned home, tiptoeing in 3:30 a.m., he emailed two of his tracks to her. “Don't share, please,” he cautioned. Then he Skyped Ramaaker in Breda; Ramaaker chided him for spinning dumbed-down EDM. Bowie had a photo of Ramaaker on his workstation; Ramaaker spinning in Paris, the crowd on fire.
On defense, Bowie told him he'd dropped in a couple of his own tunes too. “Send,” said Ramaaker. Bowie did, then climbed under an unruly mountain of comforters. Soon came an IM from the Netherlands. “Better,” Ramaaker told him. “Not ready.”
He nodded off, purple light bouncing off a mirror ball pin-pricking his eyes.
H
IS
MOTHER
KNOCKED
ON
HIS
door. Bowie fought through the fog; his throat frogged as he tried to respond. Cold morning sun pressed against the basement blinds. He draped a comforter like a cape around his shoulders as he toddled across the room, bypassing his beat-up pawnshop Fender Jazzmaster bass.
“Bowie,” she stage-whispered. Kim Thomas aspired to fame in the nineties. A glam rock revival. She never played a gig outside of Michigan. “There's somebodyâBowie, get out here. Hurry.”
His clothes were in a pile on the floor. As he hobbled into his pants, he tapped his iMac's space bar. He had 178 incoming emails.
He walked in bare feet upstairs to the kitchen. Ionic Strength was sitting in his father's seat, his hands wrapped around a cup of instant cocoa.
Kim fluffed her son's hair. “There he is,” she said. “My Bowie.”
Ionic Strength, the producer and twice voted the world's greatest DJ by
DJ Mag
back in the late nineties, stood and extended a warm hand. “What are you? Twelve?”
In shock and still half-asleep, Bowie smiled. He had his father's easy manner.
“He's seventeen,” Kim Thomas announced. The Damned T-shirt she wore was about twenty years old.
“And a hundred pounds.”
“Lanky,” she said, running her hands along her hips. Bowie's father was a bear of a man, big, bearded, and flannelled. A hippie cabinetmaker.
“Pack up,” Ionic Strength told the boy. Ion wore a silk T under a pearl-gray suit. His midnight-black hair, parted in the center, was an arc around his tanned face. A diamond ring glittered on the middle finger of his right hand. Bowie knew it was a gift from a Super Bowl champ who wanted in. Everyone knew Ion made the tracks that bore the jock's name. As a producer, Ionic Strength was as dependable as Kraft cheese.
“LA?” Bowie said.
“LA,” replied Ionic Strength, who had a limo at the curb and a private jet waiting at the nearby municipal airport.
Bowie nodded. “How did you know?”
“They return my calls before I dial,” Ionic Strength replied, allowing his perfect teeth to shine.
Kim shivered in delight.
“No. Really,” Bowie said.
Again, Ion smiled.
Bowie retreated to his room and, as he packed his duffel, scrolled through his emails. Emily, it turned out, had posted on Soundcloud the tracks he'd sent her. Of the now-189 emails, twelve were from her. She apologized with a torrent of emojis and exclamation points. “I couldn't help myself. I got excited. They were brilliant,” she wrote. “Both tracks. Especially âEuphrosine.' So hot, so chill. Forgive me. Please. Say you do. Bowie. Bowie?”
Angry, not angry, Bowie took up his laptop and returned to the kitchen. Ionic Strength was in the limo, savoring the heat. Late January, in the UP, it was eight degrees on a sunny Saturday.
“Bowie,” Kim said, clattering with excitement, “I should go with you.”
With a little laugh, he replied, “I don't think you bring your mom to these things.”
“But what are âthese things'? Bowie?”
Good question, he thought. Maybe all it is a free trip to LA. “I guess I'll find out . . .”
“And don't sign anything. Bowie, oh Jesus, how can you be so calm?”
Bowie shrugged. He had long fantasized about a moment like this, though Ionic Strength would've been about the last producer he would've put in the picture.
“Message me.” Now she was hopping in place, baggy socks sliding up, down.
Bowie grabbed a banana. “Tell Dad.”
Yes. But not until the plane is in the air.
He kissed his Mom on the forehead.
“Bowie, jump on it,” she whispered. “Get it all.”
He walked toward the long white limo, its engine puttering, clouds billowing from the tailpipe.
“A
ND
YOU
LET
HIM
GO
?” Ben Thomas said. They were in his storefront workshop on 3 Mile Road, surrounded by the scent of bare wood and steam heat. A converted shoe-repair shop, it was cluttered with unfinished furniture; empty drawers awaited cabinets and end tables. In the backroom, an old radio offered earnest folk music.
“What choice did I have? This could be it.”
Ben had his safety goggles high up in his unruly hair. His beard wore sawdust flakes.
“Besides, it's Bowie. He knows what he's doing.”
In LA? With record producers who fly a private jet to the UP on a whim? What kind of money is behind that man and what kind of authority does it bring? “He had better.”
“I offered to go.”
“Kim . . . do we know how to reach him?”
“He has his phone.” Ben lived happily without technology. He'd never sent an instant message, never downloaded an app, never owned a laptop. He had a flip phone for emergencies.
He looked at his knobby fingers and knotty hands as if they held an answer.
“He deserves this, Ben,” Kim said with a trace of defiance.
He groped for his safety glasses. “Let's talk later.”
As she departed, he thought,
Deserve?
All these years together and he hadn't yet convinced her that there was no such thing as “deserve.”
N
OT
THAT
HE
WASN
'
T
IMPRESSED
by the private jet or immune to the flattery of the beautiful pilot and the beautiful stewardess, but Bowie was asleep by the time the flight rose over Eau Claire. Nestled in a buttery seat that reclined to flat, he woke up briefly to find Ionic Strength in his throne-like leather chair and working his laptop. Bowie knew Ion preferred easy-to-use Ableton for his productions.
Bowie rustled, pulling the blanket up to his shoulder. Of commercial EDM, the kind Ionic Strength brought to the market, Deadmau5 had said, “The songs sound the same. I'm surprised the record companies that sign these people aren't just going home and making the music themselves. Cut out the middleman.”
Bowie knew how cookie-cutter EDM was made. He would challenge himself to identify, before a track ended, the source of the tones and beats. He tried to do it without judgmentâhis father told him long ago that people have their reasons for doing what they do, even if they don't make sense to usâbut at times he couldn't believe how lazy some producers could be. He wondered if Ion was building a track by dragging and dropping files from Ableton's library or from other cuts he'd already produced.
The stewardess wheeled a cart to Bowie, who had caught the scent of the chateaubriand before she arrived. Kale and purple cabbage with chickpeas and grape tomatoes filled in a glass serving bowl.
Ionic Strength, now in a blue kimono, slipped off his headphones.
“No drinks.”
She nodded as she lifted the carving knife.
Bowie said, “No. No thanks.”
She feigned disappointment. “If you'd like anything, Mr. Thomas . . .”
He was asleep again when they passed high above Grand Junction.
Three hours later, a limo pulled to the curb in Silver Lake. Ion's driver hurried to open Bowie's door. At the airport in Burbank, Ionic Strength told Bowie he could spend $1,500 on clothes. Eyeing Bowie's hoodie, T-shirt, and jeans, he said, “Do like you, but, you know . . . this is this.” He nodded toward the flawless Southern California sky. January and it was eighty-five degrees. “And you're wearing me tonight.”
Bowie was confused until he remembered Ion had his own rave-appropriate clothing line.
After shopping, Bowie was driven to the Mondrian in West Hollywood. In his orange room, luxurious and Spartan, angles and dull corners, he dropped the shopping bags and opened his laptop. Now there were 314 emails, including twenty-eight from Emily. He hesitated, decided to weed through them later, and then IMed his mom back home. “Arrived,” he said. “All good.”
He tossed the five $100 bills Ion had given him onto the bed. Digging, he found the bathing suit he'd bought, changed in the gold-plated bathroom, and walked to the elevator in the embrace of the fluffy robe he found in the closet.
Quietly amazed, he fell asleep in a lounge chair by the rooftop pool, the persistent sun his cozy blanket.
“M
ALIBU
,”
SAID
I
ON
'
S
DRIVER
,
WHO
delivered to the Mondrian the red-leather jacket and waxy black slacks Bowie wore. “You heard of Rakesh Malik?” he asked.
“I have,” said Bowie, as he held up the hanger to examine the ensemble. Ionic Strength wanted him to dress up like Tiësto, the Dutch DJ said to be the first $25 million a year man in EDM.
Malik was owner and CEO of RM Global, the international management firm. RM Global had many DJs and producers under contract. It invested in clubs in world markets and provided capital for mega-festivals. RM Global was publicly traded on one stock exchange or another. Bowie hardly knew what that meant, but over in Breda, it annoyed Ramaaker no end. “So you wouldn't mind that your father made furniture for Sears?” he once asked via Skype. “You want the shareholders to pick the wood, the lacquer?”
There were maybe fifty people at the party, maybe one hundred, Bowie couldn't tell. The room was dark; candle lights flickered. People came and went, air kisses for hello and goodbye. A wet bar. Hors d'oeuvres were circulated. The house was out of a glossy magazine. Or, better, a movie. A movie about a party in a home owned by a mogul who wanted to sign a seventeen-year-old from the UP.
Out on the deck, a DJ spun clichés. People dug it, Bowie noticed. They bobbed and shuffled. They were all as beautiful as their clothes: it was as if the mannequins in those Melrose Avenue boutiques had come to life. Perfume competed with the ocean air.
Fizzy water in hand, Bowie sidled toward the DJ, who was working his controller like he was spinning vinyl on two turntables: hunched over, deep in concentration, his headphones around his neck; a well-timed fist pump or two, sly eye contact after the almost seamless segue between tracks. Meanwhile, the unnamed DJ had patched his laptop into the soundsystem: he'd pre-programmed his set. What the crowd wanted, or what the moment demanded, didn't matter to him. He was on autopilot.
This was weak by house standards, thought Bowie Thomas. Make that play in Chicago or Detroit clubs and see that door marked “Lame . . .”?
Bowie's parents were sitting on his bony shoulders. Maybe that's the best he can do, son. Go knock him aside, Bowie. Take overâ
He felt a hand on the small of his back, and when he turned, there was Ionic Strength, Malik at his flank.
“Here's your boy,” Ion said with cheer. He wasn't the only man wearing sunglasses at night.
Rakesh Malik's eyes sparkled when he smiled.
“Hi, Bowie,” he said warmly as they shook hands. “Thank you for coming.”
Malik was in his mid-forties with a salt-and-pepper goatee. Short, fit, and gleaming, he wore business apparel, gray and lavender. There was a faint trace of India in his accent as he spoke over the booming music.
“I trust Ion is taking good care of you,” Malik said.
“He is,” Bowie nodded.
“But it's all a bit much.”
“It's all a bit much,” Bowie agreed. He wasn't sure what he was projecting, but he roiled inside.
“At least there is music,” Malik said. He held a champagne flute.
Ionic Strength waited for Bowie's reply.